Chuck Hagel, Israel, and American Power

By Jim Talent

Thursday, January 31, 2013

 

Most of the debate over the Hagel nomination has focused on his views regarding Israel, and understandably so. The United States has a long history of strong support for the Jewish state. That policy has expressed itself in material aid to Israel, close partnership with the Israelis on defense and intelligence, public support for Israel’s basic strategy in dealing with the Palestinians, a clear if unspoken guarantee of Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state, and consistent action to protect it from further international isolation and to lower the level of risk that it faces in the region.

 

To be sure, the policy has not been without its ups and downs. In particular, America has tried to keep enough distance from Israel so that the United States can be an honest broker in settling the details of a peace agreement based on the two-state framework, should such an agreement ever really become possible. But the basic direction of America’s approach to Israel has been clear, and clearly understood by the world, since the Reagan administration at least, and it was affirmed numerous times by both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.

 

Senator Hagel over the years has made comments that may have been intended to, and at any rate did, signal that his views on Israel are not in the mainstream. The question is not whether those comments mean Senator Hagel is an anti-Semite. They don’t, and he isn’t. The question is whether he supports the policy, what he wants to replace it with if he doesn’t, and what his nomination means about the views of the president.

 

There are powerful moral reasons for supporting Israel. It arose out of the ashes of the Holocaust, which was, in a real sense, the collective responsibility of the West. In the 1930s, there were two kinds of countries with respect to Jews: places where they weren’t allowed to stay, and places where they weren’t allowed to go. Most of those trapped in Europe were eventually killed. Israel was created in the aftermath as a kind of safety valve against further persecution of the Jews, and it has served that purpose well. In the 1990s, about 700,000 Jews emigrated from Russia to Israel.

 

But there are other important reasons for supporting Israel. The United States has a vital national interest in preventing any aggressive, anti-American power or combination of powers from dominating the Middle East, which is why Operation Desert Storm was fought in 1990–91. To that extent, Israel’s interests converge with those of the United States. Israel is a stable democracy, an important partner in intelligence and defense operations, and a hedge against Iranian hegemony. If Israel didn’t already exist as an ally, the United States would be trying to invent an ally like her.

 

Senator Hagel may believe that America’s support for Israel is the reason for the hostility in the region toward the United States. If so, he is seriously mistaken. The radical regimes and movements in the region have a forthright agenda: expelling the influence of Western culture from the Muslim world and creating extremist governments that will impose their version of sharia law. The United States is a major target of that agenda because America represents to them the culture of the West. Israel is a minor part of that agenda at most — a distraction that they trot out to shift the focus from their actions and failures. The authoritarian, non-radicalized governments in the Middle East are much more concerned about Iranian hegemony, their own ambitions, and their domestic affairs than they are about Israel.

 

The United States has fought two wars in the Middle East over the past 20 years — three, if Libya is counted. None of them was about Israel.

 

In fact, to the extent the United States is seen as abandoning Israel, it would tend to erode our position in the region. Everyone in the Middle East respects consistency and strength. American policies that undermine Israel, no matter what excuses are offered on their behalf, would be seen as weakness and provoke further challenges to the United States.

 

The Obama administration has been less supportive of Israel than any administration in recent memory; that certainly has not pacified the region, and it has not prevented a wave of attacks against American embassies and nationals.

 

America’s guarantee of Israeli security has sustained an equilibrium in the Middle East that deters conflict. If the Obama administration distances itself further from Israel, it may lead others to believe that Israel can be overthrown by violence. An attack against Israel by other nation states is unlikely, but an increase in terrorism, sabotage, or missile or rocket attacks is not. That may happen anyway if Iran gets nuclear capability, but it will be worse if the world doubts America’s commitment to come to Israel’s aid.

 

Whatever much of the rest of the world believes, Israel thinks it has a right to exist. The Israelis will not sit idly by while their people are attacked. They will try to respond in a measured way, but without confidence that America “has their back,” as President Obama put it last year, they could make a misjudgment, and the situation could spin out of control. Israel already has nuclear weapons; if Iran acquires them as well, the last thing America needs is escalating conflict in the Middle East.

 

In short, there are powerful reasons — going to the heart of America’s vital national interests — why presidents of both parties have been careful to support Israel so consistently and so publicly, though not unconditionally.

 

Senator Hagel is a smart man and a patriot. He will have the chance to explain his views at his confirmation hearing. Perhaps his past comments about Israel indicate frustration that does not reflect his true attitude toward American support for that nation. If so, he needs to show an understanding that as secretary of defense he would not have the same latitude to speak impulsively that he had as a senator. If, on the other hand, he believes that a different policy toward Israel would better serve American security, he owes it to the country and the president he wants to serve to make his position clear in strategic terms.

 

One final point: The military establishment Senator Hagel wants to lead has been in a state of decline for many years. It is desperately in need of recapitalization and reform. The defense cuts of the last two years have made the situation vastly worse, and the “sequester” due to go into effect in a few weeks would be a final blow to military readiness. According to Admiral Thomas Coleman, commander of the surface fleet, the Navy is already becoming a “hollow force.”

 

Senator Hagel ought to explain what he will do to ensure that the military does not continue to be the scapegoat of Washington’s budget crisis. Otherwise it won’t matter what his or the president’s attitude is toward the Middle East or anywhere else. No foreign policy will protect Israel, or America, without the power to back it up.

War Is Like Rust

By Victor Davis Hanson

Thursday, January 31, 2013

 

War seems to come out of nowhere, like rust that suddenly pops up on iron after a storm.

 

Throughout history, we have seen that war can sometimes be avoided or postponed, or its effects mitigated — usually through a balance of power, alliances, and deterrence rather than supranational collective agencies. But it never seems to go away entirely.

 

Just as otherwise lawful suburbanites might slug it out over silly driveway boundaries, or trivial road rage can escalate into shooting violence, so nations and factions can whip themselves up to go to war — consider 1861, 1914, or 1939. Often, the pretexts for starting a war are not real shortages of land, food, or fuel, but rather perceptions — like fear, honor, and perceived self-interest.

 

 

To the ancient Greek philosophers Heraclitus and Plato, war was the father of us all, while peace was a brief parenthesis in the human experience. In the past, Americans of both parties seemed to accept that tragic fact.

 

After the Second World War, the United States, at great expense in blood and treasure, and often at existential danger, took on the role of protecting the free world from global Communism. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, both Democratic and Republican administrations ensured the free commerce, travel, and communications essential for the globalization boom.

 

Such peacekeeping assumed that there would always pop up a Manuel Noriega, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, or Osama bin Laden who would threaten the regional or international order. In response, the United States — often clumsily, with mixed results, and to international criticism — would either contain or eliminate the threat. Names changed, but evil remained — and as a result of U.S. vigilance the world largely prospered.

 

This bipartisan activist policy is coming to a close with the new “lead from behind” policy of the Obama administration. Perhaps America now believes that the United Nations has a better record of preventing or stopping wars — or that the history of the United States suggests we have more often caused rather than solved problems, or that with pressing social needs at home we can no longer afford an activist profile abroad at a time of near financial insolvency.

 

Yet the reasons for our new isolationism, analogous to early 1914 or 1939, do not matter; all that matters is the reality that lots of bad actors now believe that the United States cannot or will not impede their agendas — and that no one else will in our absence. Americans are rightly tired of the Afghan and Iraq wars. Yet we left no monitoring force in Iraq and are winding down precipitately in Afghanistan, and thus have no guarantees that our decade-long struggle for postwar consensual government will survive in either place.

 

Much of North Africa is beginning to resemble Somalia. Our tag-along strategy in Libya resulted in sheer chaos, with an American ambassador and three others killed in Benghazi. The Muslim Brotherhood, headed by anti-Semite Mohamed Morsi, has turned Egypt into a failed state. Islamists killed dozens of Western hostages in Algeria. The French are unilaterally trying to prevent an Islamist takeover of Mali. Meanwhile, 60,000 died in Syria, with thousands more fatalities to come.

 

The common theme? Middle East authoritarians and Islamists expect that the United States will probably lecture a lot about peace and do very little about war.

 

China and Japan appear to be on the verge of a shooting incident over unimportant disputed islands that nonetheless seem very important in terms of national prestige. A more muscular government in Tokyo and an expanding Japanese navy suggest that the Japanese are running out of patience with Chinese bullying.

 

Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan all have the wealth and expertise to become nuclear to deter Chinese aggression, but so far they have not — only because of their reliance on a previously engaged and militarily omnipotent United States.

 

A near-starving North Korea, when not threatening South Korea, periodically announces that it is pointing a test missile at Japan or the United States. Few believe that the present sanctions will stop Iran’s trajectory toward a nuclear bomb. The more the Argentine economy tanks, the more its government talks about the “Malvinas” — replaying the preliminaries that led to the 1982 Falklands Islands war.

 

In the last four years, tired of Iraq and Afghanistan, and facing crushing debt, we have outsourced collective action, deterrence, and peacekeeping to the Arab League, the French, the British, the Afghan and Iraqi security forces, and the United Nations. Does America now believe that our weaker allies, polite outreach, occasional obeisance and apology, euphemism, good intentions — or simple neglect — will defuse tensions that seem to be leading to conflict the world over?

 

Perhaps, but there is no evidence in either human nature or our recorded past to believe such a rosy prognosis.

History Lesson: Under Fascist Bush, Democrats Feared Tyranny

By Larry Elder

Thursday, January 31, 2013

 

Once upon a time, a group of people known as the "Democrats" expressed great fear of tyranny by government.This was a time long, long ago, when a man from a place called Texas, representing a people known as the Republicans, occupied the White House. Leaders of the Democrats feared tyranny by the Republicans and called the man from Texas racist, oppressive and tyrannical.

 

To refresh your recollection, we offer a few examples from the distant past:

 

Billionaire Democratic contributor George Soros. He said the George W. Bush White House displayed the "supremacist ideology of Nazi Germany" and that Bush's administration used rhetoric that echoed his childhood in occupied Hungary. "When I hear Bush say, 'You're either with us or against us,'" Soros said, "it reminds me of the Germans." Soros later said: "The Bush administration and the Nazi and communist regimes all engaged in the politics of fear. ... Indeed, the Bush administration has been able to improve on the techniques used by the Nazi and communist propaganda machines."

 

Former Vice President Al Gore. He said: "(George W. Bush's) executive branch has made it a practice to try and control and intimidate news organizations, from PBS to CBS to Newsweek. ... And every day, they unleash squadrons of digital brown shirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President."

 

Former two-time Democratic presidential candidate and civil rights leader the Rev. Jesse Jackson. After Congress passed new anti-terrorism laws following 9/11, he said: "We are in danger. The extreme right wing has seized the government. Tonight, (John) Ashcroft and the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security and the IRS can work together. So look out, because without a definition of who is a terrorist, anyone can be. ... Martin Luther King could have been. ... The right-wing media, the FBI -- they are targeting our leadership."

 

Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee. He said: "What we are dealing with right now in this country is whether we are having a kind of bloodless, silent coup or not. ... (President Bush) is trying to bring to himself all the power to become an emperor -- to create Empire America." An Iraq War opponent, McDermott said, "The President of the United States will lie to the American people in order to get us into this war."

 

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who sits on four Senate committees, including Armed Services and Commerce. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, she said, "George Bush let people die on rooftops in New Orleans because they were poor and because they were black."

 

Entertainer and liberal activist Harry Belafonte. When asked whether the number and prominence of blacks in the Bush administration suggested a lack of racism on Bush's part, Belafonte said, "Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich."

 

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, former presidential candidate. He characterized the contest between Democrats and Republicans as "a struggle of good and evil. And we're the good." Shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks, Dean actually mused about an "interesting theory" he'd heard -- that G.W. Bush had prior knowledge of 9/11 yet took no action to stop it!

 

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. In 2003, Albright said she thought Bush had already captured Osama bin Laden -- but that Bush was not going to reveal this until just before the 2004 election to get maximum political benefit! She later claimed she was joking, but Morton Kondracke, who overheard the comment, said, "She was not smiling when she said this," and that others in the room heard it, too, "and they didn't think it was a joke."

 

Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., sitting member of all six subcommittees of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. He compared the newly conservative-controlled Republican House of Representatives to "the Duma and the Reichstag" -- referring to the legislature set up by Czar Nicholas II of Russia and the parliament of the German Weimar Republic that brought Hitler to power.

 

An anti-gun New York newspaper published a report and interactive map with the names and addresses of gun permit holders in Westchester and Rockland counties. Shortly after this, an anti-gun columnist for a prominent New Jersey paper said: "(I got) a nasty note from one of my most progressive friends who says ... 'You're a fool because when the right wing takes over the government, we're gonna need guns. ... And then there won't be guns to fight them back."

 

"Words matter," Obama once said.

 

During the Bush years, Democrats feared, or at least claimed to fear, the possibility of tyranny -- precisely the purpose of the Second Amendment. If these Democrats were even remotely sincere, why wouldn't any self-respecting patriot want the right to keep and bear arms to protect against thugs like that? Indeed, why not mandatory gun ownership -- at least when Republicans control the White House?

 

You warned us. We believe you. The threat of tyranny is ever-present.

The Debt Deniers’ Fantasy

By Michael Tanner

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

 

It’s not quite on a par with 9/11 truthers or Obama birthers, but recently a number of liberal commentators have descended into the fever swamps of denialism by rejecting the most basic facts about our debt and deficit. Mind you, they are not arguing about the best policies to reduce the debt — taxe hikes vs. spending cuts — but actually denying that the problem exists at all.

 

Paul Krugman, for example, pronounces the debt problem “mostly solved.” Matt Yglesias of Slate asks, “What sovereign debt crisis? There certainly isn’t one in the United States.” Bruce Bartlett, every liberal economist’s favorite former conservative, adds that “our long-term budget situation is not nearly as severe as even many budget experts believe.”

 

Bolstered by a study from the left-wing Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the debt deniers claim that a combination of economic growth, tax hikes, and projected (but not yet realized) spending reductions have already significantly reduced deficits. They argue that a mere $1.2 trillion in additional tax hikes over the next ten years, and the resulting savings on interest, would enable us to “stabilize” our debt at a mere 73 percent of GDP by 2022.

 

Now there’s something to get excited about: stabilizing our debt at an amount equal to nearly three-quarters of the value of all goods and services produced in this country each year. Yippee!

 

But even if you think that’s good news, it’s not really the truth. The 73 percent figure actually represents only that portion of the federal government’s debt classified as “debt held by the public,” primarily those U.S. government securities that are owned by individuals, corporations, and other entities outside the federal government itself. Debt held by the public currently totals roughly $11.6 trillion and is expected to rise to roughly $19.1 trillion by 2022.

 

Left out of this analysis, however, is roughly $4.9 trillion in “intragovernmental” debt, which consists of the debts that the federal government owes to itself, through more than 100 government trust funds, revolving accounts, and special accounts, such as the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds (worth $2.7 trillion and $344 billion respectively). The combination of debt held by the public and intergovernmental debt yields our current $16.4 trillion in total red ink.

 

The debt deniers justify ignoring intragovernmental debt on the grounds that only debt held by the public competes with investment in the nongovernmental sector. Moreover, while interest on debt held by the public is paid in cash and creates a burden on current taxpayers, intragovernmental-debt holdings typically do not require cash payments from the current budget and don’t present a burden on today’s economy.

 

Intragovernmental debt can also be considered somewhat “softer” than debt held by the public, since the government can control when and whether trust-fund debt is paid through, for example, alterations to the Social Security benefit formula.

 

But the federal government, and deficit doves, cannot simply write off intragovernmental debt as inconsequential. As opponents of Social Security reform often argue when asserting the program’s solvency, the securities held by the Social Security Trust Fund are backed “by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government.” Eventually the securities held by the various trust funds and other accounts will have to be redeemed, just as if intragovernmental debt were debt held by the public. No matter how you treat intragovernmental debt today, repaying it should be included in any projection of future government spending.

 

Therefore, a fair accounting of our debt should include both that held by the public and intragovernmental debt. By that accounting, we currently owe 102 percent of GDP, and by 2022 our national debt will be 118 percent of GDP.

 

Moreover, by cutting off the trend line in 2022, the debt deniers ignore the enormous unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare, the costs of which will kick in mostly beyond this limited budget window. According to Social Security’s board of trustees, the discounted present value (the amount that would have to be set aside today, earning 3 percent interest, in order to pay future shortfalls forever) of that program’s unfunded liabilities is more than $20.5 trillion. And, according to the most optimistic estimates by the Obama administration itself, the discounted present value of Medicare’s unfunded liabilities is more than $42 trillion. And that is an estimate that assumes Obamacare actually reduces health-care costs.

 

True, those obligations represent the “softest” form of debt. But “soft” does not mean debt that can be completely dismissed. According to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), by which private corporations abide, promises to pay future benefits are generally categorized as debt. After all, those benefit payments are called for under current law, and it would take congressional action to change them. Unless and until Congress reforms Social Security and Medicare, those obligations exist, but debt deniers are especially vehement in their opposition to precisely such reform. By their very failure to reform Social Security and Medicare, the deniers harden the program’s future liabilities.

 

If we include all this debt — public debt, intragovernmental debt, and unfunded liabilities — we currently owe at least $79 trillion, 500 percent of GDP, and perhaps as much as $127 trillion, 800 percent of GDP.

 

That said, these future liabilities will be paid not out of today’s but out of future economic production, which will inevitably be larger. Measurements of the discounted present value of future liabilities are extremely sensitive to assumptions about future interest/discount rates. Therefore, a better way to calculate the true size of the national debt might be to measure the share of a country’s future GDP that will be required to finance that debt. By this measure, the United States faces a debt equal to an additional 9 percent of its future GDP forever.

 

However, this may underestimate the tax burden required to pay the debt, because a country’s tax base is only a fraction of its GDP. Accordingly, the tax increases required to pay the debt would need to be much larger as a percentage of the current tax base than as a percentage of GDP. For example, the payroll-tax base equals slightly less than one-half of GDP, implying that the 15.3 percent U.S. payroll-tax rate would have to be more than doubled to pay our debt. Similarly, the income-tax base is roughly 36 percent of GDP, meaning that revenue from income taxes would have to more than double, requiring massive rate increases just to pay what we owe.

 

Taxes at such levels would almost certainly depress both investment and consumption, substantially slowing economic growth.

 

Indeed, the debt is likely reducing economic growth already. The International Monetary Fund looked at the relationship between debt and economic growth, concluding that, from 1890 to 2000, countries with high debt levels have consistently experienced slower economic growth than those with low debt levels. Similarly, economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff concluded that countries with debt totaling more than 90 percent of GDP have median growth rates one percentage point lower than countries with lower debt levels, and average growth rates nearly four points lower. The slow economic growth that the United States has seen coming out of the recession is likely due in part to our high levels of government debt.

 

Perhaps this was all thought up by President Obama’s Muslim Kenyan overlords to hide the Mossad’s role in 9/11, but I sort of doubt it. The debt deniers’ argument is about as unrealistic.

Soldier-Girl Blues

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

 

What if, during the presidential campaign, Mitt Romney had accused President Obama of wanting to let servicewomen serve in combat? After all, Obama had hinted as much in 2008. What would Obama’s response have been?

 

My hunch is that he would have accused Romney of practicing the “politics of division” or some such and denied it.

 

In any case, wouldn’t an open debate have been better than putting women into combat by fiat? You’d think the folks who are always clamoring for a “national conversation” on this, that, and the other thing would prefer to make a sweeping change after, you know, a national conversation.

 

Instead, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced the change on his way out the door. And Panetta has been lionized even though it wasn’t really his decision to make. If the president didn’t want this to happen, it wouldn’t happen. Perhaps Obama let Panetta run with the idea, just in case it turned out to be a political fiasco.

 

The good news for Obama is that it hasn’t been. Absent any informed debate, polls support the idea. Indeed, the Republican party has been shockingly restrained in even questioning what is a vastly bigger deal than the lifting of the half-ban on gays in the military — “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The mainstream media have celebrated the milestone and largely yawned at the skeptics.

 

Most lacking from the coverage is any attempt to explain how this will make combat units better at combat. Instead, we’re told that gender integration is necessary because without combat experience, it’s hard for women to get promoted.

 

Lifting that glass ceiling is an understandable, even lofty desire. But what does it have to do with making the military better at fighting?

 

My point isn’t that women should be kept out of all combat roles. Indeed, as many supporters of the move are quick to point out, women are already getting shot at. “In our male-centric viewpoint, we want to keep women from harm’s way,” Ric Epps, a former Air Force intelligence officer who teaches political science, told the Los Angeles Times. “But . . . modern warfare has changed. There are no true front lines; the danger is everywhere, and women have already been there in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

 

True enough. But does anyone believe such changes are permanent? Will we never again have front lines? Or are the generals simply fighting the last war and projecting that experience out into the future?

 

Heck, if we’ll never have wars between standing armies again, we can really afford to cut the defense budget. Something tells me that’s not the conclusion the Pentagon wants us to draw.

 

It is a common habit of many liberals and self-avowed centrists to preen about how they don’t deny science and evolution the way conservatives do. Well, on this issue, it is the opponents of women in combat invoking the scientific data that confirm a fairly obvious evolutionary fact: Men and women are different. For instance, at her physical peak, “the average woman has the aerobic capacity of a 50-year-old male,” notes defense intellectual and veteran Mackubin Thomas Owens in a powerfully empirical article in The Weekly Standard.

 

Another evolutionary fact is that men act different when around women. This creates challenges for unit cohesion and fighting effectiveness.

 

The three most common responses to such concerns are that countries such as Israel and Canada let women in combat; advances for women can’t be held hostage to sexist attitudes; and there won’t be any lowering of standards, so only physically qualified women will be in combat.

 

As to the first point, Israeli gender integration is often wildly exaggerated. And the Canadians have neither the capacity nor the need for a large standing army.

 

The latter arguments don’t strike me as particularly reality-based either. Sexist attitudes alone aren’t a justification for anything. But we’re not talking about misogyny here. Proof of that is the fact that the military already practices gender-norming (giving women extra points for being women) in many instances. Will there really be less now?

 

Obama’s decision hasn’t stifled the debate, it’s merely postponed it until the day Americans see large numbers of women coming home in body bags, alongside the men.

A Pointless Amnesty

National Review Online

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

 

Illegal immigration is a curious subject: It is one of the few domains in which the authorities entrusted with enforcing the law feel obliged to negotiate the most concessionary terms and conditions with those who are breaking it, as though law enforcement were an embarrassing inconvenience. But the rule of law, national security, and economic dynamism are not mere pro forma matters — they are in fact fundamental, a reality lost on our would-be “comprehensive” immigration reformers.

 

There are several new immigration proposals in the political pipeline: one from President Obama, one from a bipartisan group in the Senate, and one from a bipartisan group in the House. Each of the proposals contains an amnesty for the dozen million or so illegals already in the country, and none of them contains adequate security provisions. Panicked Republicans are looking for a grand bargain, but they are wrong on both the politics and the policy. Piecemeal reform emphasizing empirical security benchmarks is a far better option.

 

The terms of the amnesty vary in the different proposals, but is far from obvious that there should be a “path to citizenship” on any terms for illegals at this time. Whether it is desirable to regularize the status of those illegals already here, and on what terms such a regularization might be offered, are questions that can be answered only when the immigration system is under control. That is a matter of political prudence — the experience of the 1980s amnesty suggests that it is easier to offer an amnesty than to secure the border — but also of context: Reviewing and processing the millions of illegals already here would be a vast administrative task, and we will not know how to go about managing it intelligently until we see what the environment looks like after illegal immigration is under control.

 

Why an amnesty now? Maybe it is only the polls. John McCain, a principal instigator of the Senate group, has made his motives clear: “Elections, elections — the Republican party is losing the support of Hispanic citizens.” His plan apparently is to develop a bipartisan approach to helping Republicans win elections; perhaps Chuck Schumer imagines other outcomes. Senator McCain has not said why he believes that the interests of Hispanic citizens are to be identified with those of non-citizens, why those interests should trump the interests of citizens (including Hispanic citizens) harmed by the lawlessness of our borders, or why a senator with an established record for supporting amnesty could not muster one in three votes from those Hispanic citizens.

 

Republican immigration reformers with an eye to political reality should begin by appreciating that Latinos are a Democratic constituency. They did not vote for Mitt Romney. They did not vote for John McCain. They did not vote for George W. Bush, and in the election before that they did not vote for George W. Bush again. In 1998, George W. Bush was reelected to the governorship of Texas with 27 percent of the African-American vote — an astonishing number for an unabashed conservative. Bush won 68 percent of the overall vote in that election, carrying 240 out of Texas’s 254 counties. Hispanics voted overwhelmingly for Democrat Gary Mauro.

 

And, if we are to take Hispanics at their word, conservative attitudes toward illegal immigration are a minor reason for their voting preferences. While many are in business for themselves, they express hostile attitudes toward free enterprise in polls. They are disproportionately low-income and disproportionately likely to receive some form of government support. More than half of Hispanic births are out of wedlock. Take away the Spanish surname and Latino voters look a great deal like many other Democratic constituencies. Low-income households headed by single mothers and dependent upon some form of welfare are not looking for an excuse to join forces with Paul Ryan and Pat Toomey. Given the growing size of the Hispanic vote, it would help Republicans significantly to lose it by smaller margins than they have recently. But the idea that an amnesty is going to put Latinos squarely in the GOP tent is a fantasy.

 

No immigration reform deserving the name is possible without first enforcing the law at the border and at the workplace. Conveniently for Republicans, doing so is very popular — two out of three voters support building a border fence. Indeed, even Senator McCain has been known to utter the words “build the danged fence.” There is no reason, political or substantive, for failing to do so. Securing the border is more popular in the polls than is amnesty, even in the Associated Press poll that carefully omits the word “amnesty.”

 

About that word. Call it “regularization,” call it a “path to citizenship,” it amounts to precisely the same thing: a decision to set aside the law and to ignore its violation. And therein lies a problem for so-called comprehensive reform: Normalizing the status of the millions of illegal immigrants already in the country, either in toto or in part, would require the development and application of standards for doing so, whether those are relatively narrow (as in the DREAM Act and similar proposals) or broad. Unless we mean to legalize every illegal in the country — including violent felons, gang members, cartel henchmen, and the like — there will be of necessity a system for sorting them out. It is difficult to believe that the same government that failed to enforce the law in the first place will be very scrupulous about standards as it goes about dealing with the consequences of its own incompetence.

 

It is for that reason that broader reform measures must wait until credible enforcement mechanisms are in place. Those mechanisms include, at a minimum, a physically secured border and mandatory universal use of the E-Verify system, which confirms the legal status of new hires. We agree with Senator Rubio’s view that “we can’t be the only nation in the world that does not enforce its immigration laws. . . . Modernization of the legal immigration system is impossible unless we first secure the border and implement an E-Verify system.” We very much doubt that Senator Rubio will achieve meaningful border security in cooperation with Senators Schumer, Durbin, Menendez, and Bennet. The less-of-the-same version being developed in the House with the support of John Boehner and Paul Ryan almost certainly will suffer from similar defects, since it appears to be based on the same premises. And the other party in this negotiation, President Obama, is even less likely to place enforcement at the center of his immigration agenda; the president has nominally endorsed the Senate reform principles, but the White House already has signaled that it intends to oppose Rubio’s proposal that any amnesty be delayed until the security of the border has been verified.

 

Rather than getting their heads handed to them in yet another grand bargain, Republicans should push for piecemeal reform through focused, narrow legislation. Senator Rubio’s security measures would be a good place to start. Mandatory and universal use of E-Verify, together with improvements in the program, should have been legislated years ago. We should create a technological system for monitoring and preventing visa overstays, the source of 40 percent of our illegal immigration, to say nothing of the 9/11 plotters — although Congress has already mandated it six separate times in the past 17 years, and it’s still not done. Likewise, Congress passed a law in 2006 mandating that a double-layer border fence be completed; it has not. Which is to say, the executive branch is no more in compliance with the law than the illegals themselves. Congress should demand that the fence be completed in accordance with the law. Other reforms, such as making economic skills rather than the reunification of extended families the main criterion for legal immigration, also deserve consideration. But rather than achieve that, both the president’s program and Rubio’s would expand “guest worker” provisions, as though there were an acute shortage of low-skilled labor in the United States.

 

Senator Rubio argues that a grand bargain is necessary because an enforcement-only bill could not pass the Senate, while an amnesty-only deal would not pass the House. But he is drawing the wrong conclusion from that stalemate: The better course of action is to fight for sensible enforcement provisions right now and let Democrats explain to an anxious electorate why they insist on holding enforcement of the law hostage to an immediate amnesty. And no grand bargain will take immigration off the table as a political issue: Liberals can always argue for weaker enforcement provisions in the future, easier pathways to legal residency and citizenship, and the like.

 

Senator Rubio, an exemplary conservative leader, is correct that our immigration system is broken. And he is correct that, at some point, we are going to have to do something about the millions of illegals already here. But he is wrong about how to go about repairing our immigration system, and wrong to think that an amnesty-and-enforcement bill at this time will end up being anything other than the unbuttered side of a half-a-loaf deal. And there is no reason to make a bad deal for fear of losing a Latino vote Republicans never had.

The Age of Tokenism

By Victor Davis Hanson

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

 

It is a depressing characteristic of government today to loudly enact legislation and impose regulations of little utility, while neglecting to address the root causes of truly serious problems. We do not know to what degree a Sandy Hook or a Columbine is caused by improperly treated mental illness, violent video games, Hollywood’s saturation of the popular culture with graphic mayhem — or access, by hook or by crook, to semi-automatic “assault” rifles. But we do know that the latter play almost no role in Chicago’s horrific annual tally of 500 murders — and account for less than 1 percent of the gun-related deaths in the United States each year. Yet we also confess that taking on Hollywood, the video-game industry, or the mental-health establishment would be far more acrimonious and politically risky than demonizing the National Rifle Association.

 

In the case of big-city murdering, serious talk about the culture of gangs and the causes of the pathology of thousands of minority males, who are vastly overrepresented as both victims and perpetrators of gun violence, is a no-win proposition, given the politically correct climate and the existential issues involved. Can one imagine any politician decrying the violent lyrics of rap music, the culture of dependency on government, or the absence of stiff incarceration for the use of a gun during a crime with the same zeal that he has shown in going after the NRA?

 

The result of such selective and easy morality is that we are now engaging in banning certain types of guns with little understanding of how they work. Take your grandfather’s semi-automatic .22 varmint gun, beef up the round a bit, add some scary-looking black plastic M-16-like adornments, and you now have a demonic “assault rifle.” The gun debate will cause needless divisions and acrimony, but in no measurable way will it either prevent another Sandy Hook or reduce the yearly slaughter of young males in our cities. When the next Columbine occurs — with the perpetrators using pump shotguns, or multiple ten-shot magazines, or sticks of dynamite — we will pat ourselves on the back and say it would have been worse had an “assault rifle” been used. And if the latter is employed, it will probably not have been legally acquired and more likely than not will be used by someone long recognized as unhinged.

 

After all the fighting over the fiscal cliff, and all the demagoguery over the rich paying their fair share, we have achieved almost nothing tangible in terms of reducing the debt. The president offered no budget freeze, no curtailment of entitlement costs, no adjustments in age or other conditions of eligibility — nothing at all that would have addressed the astronomical rate at which the government has been spending since 2009. Obama is therapist-in-chief, and he avoids any tragic admission that there are sometimes just a bad choice and a worse one — in this case, between cutting back and going broke.

 

We used to talk of going back to the “Clinton tax rates” — a campaign sound bite that of course meant that we most certainly would not increase the once-hated but now-popular Bush rates on the 99 percent, much less return to Clinton-era spending levels. In other words, we taxed the 1 percent more, felt great about it, declared success, and now still face financial Armageddon — terrified to tell the 99 percent that either their taxes must go way up, or their entitlements must go way down, or more likely both. What we have failed to do would solve the problem and cause a national outcry; what we have actually done is as widely popular as it will do nothing.

 

Note that the war is not between the easily caricatured 1 percent, who pay almost 40 percent of aggregate federal income taxes, and the put-upon 99 percent; rather, it is a far more messy fight between the struggling 53 percent who pay income tax and mostly do not receive food stamps, unemployment insurance, or disability coverage, and the 47 percent who do not pay income tax and are more likely to receive state and federal assistance.

 

Keeping small residual forces in Iraq and Afghanistan might well have allowed the provisional consensual governments in those two countries to remain viable and not be transmogrified into tyrannies. To do so might have ensured that the terrible cost in American blood and treasure over the last decade at least had offered Afghans and Iraqis — and the world — something better than the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. Yet to keep small bases there would also have angered American voters, sick of both wars and of the seeming ingratitude of those we did so much to help.

 

In contrast, packing up and going home, as we have from Iraq and will from Afghanistan, offers instant sound bites — something like “ending perpetual wars.” When the videos pop up of Taliban lynchings or a civil war in Iraq — remember the Kurds in 1991 and the Vietnamese in 1975 — we can shrug that this was the inevitable wages of President Bush’s sins, not something that President Obama could have prevented.

 

No one knows how to break the cycle of Middle East violence, much less how to address the tribalism, statism, lack of transparency and freedom, gender apartheid, religious fundamentalism, and intolerance so ubiquitous in the Arab world and so much at the heart of its wide-scale poverty and violence. To attempt any such discussion would be caricatured as neo-colonialist, imperialist, racist, naïve, or culturally ignorant.

 

Iraq and Afghanistan have been too costly to serve as models; Libya is now a hushed-up embarrassment; our positions have changed so much on Syria that there now are no positions; and Mohamed Morsi’s achievement in Egypt will have been to create nostalgia for the authoritarian Hosni Mubarak. No need to touch on the events in Algeria. The French, alone, are leading from the front in trying to save Mali from Islamists. Who would wish to wade into these morasses, or even talk about them with any degree of honesty?

 

It is far easier to focus on the Israelis: They are few. They have not until recently had oil or gas; the world hates them; and their government is lawful and Western. The result is that demonizing Mr. Netanyahu as the nexus of Middle East violence carries no risks, and offers no solutions, and therefore is preferable to the dangers of candidly crafting a policy to attempt to deal with the pathologies of the modern Arab world. If it is a question of attempting to deal fairly with Netanyahu or declaring jihad a personal spiritual journey, the latter wins every time.

 

Nowhere is tokenism more manifest than in the debate over illegal immigration. No one knows whether there are 11 or 18 million illegal immigrants in the United States. It is taboo to suggest that the nearly $50 billion sent annually to Latin America from the U.S.  is largely from illegal immigrants, or that the remittances increase the likelihood that these foreign nationals must seek public assistance here, which drains local and state economies. Nor would any sane person publicly associate illegal immigration with the alarming DUI statistics in California or point out that it contributes to the record number of hit-and-run accidents in Los Angeles County.

 

Instead we talk grandly of “comprehensive immigration reform” and the “Dream Act,” but both opponents and supporters avoid the subsequent details like the plague. Everyone knows that there are millions of hard-working Latin American immigrants, who steer clear of public assistance and crime, have worked for years in the U.S., and deserve some sort of pathway to citizenship — contingent upon English proficiency, a trial period of legal residence, and a small fine for having broken the law in coming here illegally.

 

But we also dare not speak the truth about the hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens, perhaps a million or more, who are unemployed and on public assistance, who have been convicted of a crime, or who have just recently arrived. We know that unenforced laws erode respect for jurisprudence, and that simply granting open access to Latin Americans shorts those from elsewhere who wait lawfully for their turn and who may in fact have capital, education, and expertise that would allow them to contribute to the U.S. far more quickly.

 

Given that mess, we prefer the banality of “a grand bargain,” without acknowledgment that the Latino elite community would hardly be willing, as the price of a pathway for millions, to agree to the deportation of hundreds of thousands of illegals who are unemployed, have criminal records, or have just arrived — much less to sign off on closing the border, securing it, and making legal immigration ethnically blind, contingent on skills and education, and roughly equal in its treatment of all applicants. So we blather on.

 

There are two general types of leaders: the vast majority who talk in banalities while they offer tokens in lieu of solutions, and the rare tragic statesmen like Lincoln and Churchill who tell the truth, endure odium in their lifetime, find solutions, and do not live to see the full appreciation of their courage.

 

Unfortunately, we live in a low era of tokenism and banality.

The New Patriotism

By Charles Kesler

Monday, January 28, 2013

 

President Obama’s second inaugural address wasn’t eloquent, but it was effective.

 

As oratory, it made one false step after another, the result of straining for presidential orotundity. “For we, the people,” he said, for example, “understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.” A “shrinking few” makes it sound as if they are declining, or perhaps shy, and a “growing many” as if they are prospering — the opposite of his intention. The words are supposed to reinforce the argument.

 

And when discussing foreign policy, even speechwriters as young as Obama’s ought to know to avoid Neville Chamberlain’s notorious phrase, “peace in our time.”

 

Politically, however, the speech drove home its message: that President Obama stands in the tradition of Jefferson and Lincoln, and that those who oppose the Obama administration must also oppose the principles of Jefferson and Lincoln, and are therefore outside the pale of American democracy.

 

Tactically, the speech was a riposte to the Tea Party, which in its correct but haphazard way had tried to associate the American Revolution with opposition to Obama. Strategically, the second inaugural continued Obama’s effort, announced as early as 2006, to reverse the Reagan Revolution, delegitimize the conservative movement, and restore the Democrats as the majority party and liberalism as America’s official faith.

 

Obama strives, in short, to do to the Republican party what Jefferson did to the Federalists, Lincoln did to the Democrats of his day, and, above all, Franklin Roosevelt did to the GOP in the 1930s: cast the formerly dominant party into the outer, undemocratic darkness. FDR’s demonization of the Republicans reached its ruthless culmination in his reelection campaign of 1936. Having blasted them as “the party of Toryism” four years before, he elaborated on their treason the second time around, denouncing Republican leaders (though not their misguided followers) as “the privileged princes of . . . new economic dynasties, thirsting for power,” who were eager to create “a new despotism” built upon “concentration of control over material things.”

 

Throughout the campaign, Roosevelt pressed his party’s identification with the patriots of 1776. He ordered that the Democratic platform be written as a loose imitation of the Declaration of Independence, beginning and ending with paragraphs proclaiming, “We hold this truth to be self-evident.” To pick an example, the Democrats announced it was self-evident that “twelve years of Republican surrender to the dictatorship of a privileged few have been supplanted by a Democratic leadership which has returned the people themselves to the place of authority, and has revived in them new faith and restored the hope which they had almost lost.”

 

Obama followed FDR’s playbook, even unto the revival of hope and change. In fact, the 44th president’s indictment of the Republicans was much milder than Roosevelt’s, mostly because of the difference in their circumstances. In the midst of the Depression, the GOP was identified with Herbert Hoover, a figure far easier to excoriate than Ronald Reagan, whose successful presidency, even after two intervening Bushes, still buoys his party’s reputation.

 

In the 2012 campaign, Obama sided, to use his terms, with the middle class against the millionaires. But the underlying and decisive charge that the Republicans were led by a cabal of un-American plutocrats was never far away. In his acceptance speech at the convention last September, he argued, for instance, that “a freedom which asks only, what’s in it for me, a freedom . . . without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.” That selfish, unpatriotic view of freedom is the conservative view, he insinuates, which opposes all good things. The many good things conservatives oppose include, according to his second inaugural, equal opportunity, social security (in both small and capital letters), human dignity, reasoned debate, equal pay for women, equality for gays, short lines at the voting booth, “keeping our all our children . . . safe from harm,” acceptance of “the overwhelming judgment of science” on global warming, and, presumably for non-scientists, the duties of divine-right environmentalism (we must “preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God”).

 

Obama wants to seize the title deeds of American patriotism from the Reaganite Republicans. To do that, he has tried his best, following Bill Clinton’s example, to replace memories of lefty flag-burning from the Sixties with recent images of liberals’ effusively embracing flag and country and the military. After initial resistance, Obama even agreed to wear a flag pin on his lapel. God, too, gets strange new respect: Though He was booed at the Democratic convention and got admitted to the platform only by chicanery, He is mentioned six times in Obama’s second inaugural (seven, if you count a quotation from the Declaration of Independence).

 

For the strategy to work, Obama must, however, redefine patriotism and its object. Accordingly, he began his inaugural address with a prominent quotation from the Declaration’s most famous sentence. This was not primarily a gesture of civic solidarity. It was his way of reinterpreting American principles, of staking out new territory for the familiar words “equality” and “liberty,” which he proceeded to redefine in the rest of the speech.

 

This is an old liberal parlor trick. Into the magic hat goes a fluttering canary; presto chango, out comes a fat, complacent rabbit. Several commentators (especially Scott Johnson at Powerline) have already exposed the president’s sleight of hand. But for sheer audacity, it’s hard to beat the ideas juxtaposed and equated in this speech’s couple of thousand words.

 

To put it briefly: Obama began by saluting “the enduring strength of our Constitution” (not its wisdom or justice) and affirming “the promise of our democracy,” meaning the country as it will be, the America of our imagination, which to a modern liberal is the only thoroughly justifiable object of patriotic sentiments. Then he quoted the great sentence from the Declaration that begins “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights . . . ” One sentence later — one sentence! — and the Declaration was in the rearview mirror and we were off on “a never-ending journey” to “bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time.”

 

At least those foundational “words” seemed to have a meaning, or to have once had one. Because a short half-page later, Obama explains that “our purpose” is “what the moment requires” and that it is doing what the moment requires that “will give real meaning to our creed.”

 

So now the meaning of the Declaration’s solemn propositions seems to come entirely, or almost entirely, from our own needs, preferences, and choices. Only urgent and imperative actions such as fighting climate change and protecting entitlements “will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.” The fathers’ Declaration, though perhaps meaningful to them in their age, is empty and meaningless in ours until we fill it up with our own values. The “timeless spirit” of the Founding obligates us to follow the changing spirit of our times — always as interpreted by liberals, of course.

 

Thus “equality,” which for Lincoln meant the recognition of our equal humanity and therefore equal freedom, means for Obama the compulsory redistribution of wealth. “Liberty,” in turn, transforms into the right to live out the lifestyle of our choice, free from others’ offensive remarks, and with federal subsidies as necessary or demanded.

 

Even as the Declaration’s original meaning fades, so does the Constitution’s. Toward the end of the speech, Obama mentioned that the oath of office he had taken that day “was an oath to God and country,” not so different from the oath a new citizen or a soldier takes. Actually, though all these oaths are sworn before God, they are properly speaking oaths to support the Constitution. The presidential oath is emphatic, and distinctive, in that regard. He alone (unlike new citizens or soldiers) swears to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Obama overlooked the main element of his own oath, which is not so surprising given his allegiance to the living constitution, which is rather different from the written one.

 

The galling thing is that his efforts to rewrite the American political tradition may succeed. Franklin Roosevelt’s similar project not only worked, but worked so well that for two generations New Deal Democrats dominated American elections, remade American government, and reinterpreted our Constitution almost at will. Obama is no FDR, but then he doesn’t need to be. Liberalism has already done a great deal to define democracy downward.  

 

Where are the Republican politicians, the conservative statesmen, who will dedicate themselves to opposing, and reversing, this latest installment of the corruption of our republican principles and institutions? By now, all the usual arguments about the bad economy and our burgeoning debt have been exhausted. The usual electoral stratagems urged by the usual GOP consultants have been tried and have failed. It will take uncommon political intelligence and virtue, not to mention good luck, to rescue our free government.

The 'Pansi-fication' of the Male Left

By Kevin McCullough

Monday, January 28, 2013

 

Leftist, liberal, and progressive men are ushering in the greatest pansi-fication and weakening of our nation in the modern era.

 

Awkwardly refusing leadership in times of real crisis, the men of the left, are allowing women and children to literally be the mouthpiece and driving force behind the cause. They do so dishonestly, disingenuously, and they do so without discernment.

 

In recent days the president hid behind the letters of four children that he claimed, "were really smart" to help shape his approach to reforms he claimed constitutional authority over, to implement in response to recent shootings. (Not ever having it cross his mind that perhaps the co-equal legislative branch of government was designed for such purposes.)

 

The letters asked him the penetrating policy questions like, "Will you please stop all gun violence?" Or, "Please get rid of guns, 'no guns, no guns, no guns, no guns.'"

 

Yet the executive order wand he waived will likely increase gun violence, at least on law abiding people.

 

Also this week Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta--no doubt acting on behalf of the President--decided unilaterally to push the women of America into front line combat roles in our nation's wars. Note that it is a man who unilaterally makes the decision, without input of military leaders, or the vote or voice of women in America at large.

 

I spent hours of broadcast time this week, on my daily radio show, (that reaches in excess of 300 cities) asking the women of America their thoughts on the decision. Of the hundreds of email, phone calls, tweets, and facebook messages returned I could not get one woman--not one--who would personally say she was willing to go. And in overwhelming ratios--last count close to 29 to 1 women believed it was not even proper for women to be put into combat scenarios. I might also add that amongst the responses included, were a large percentage of active duty women.

 

This week also noted the 40th commemoration of the historically laughable piece of adjudication known as Roe v. Wade. A case so thoroughly debunked on its grounds that law schools across America poke mockery at it's existence. Nonetheless the fraud of judicial activism that it is, continues to be celebrated as an important step for women... but mostly by men.

 

"Reverend" Harry Knox of the Religious Coalition of Reproductive Choice, being foremost among them.

 

"Reverend" Knox claimed this week, "The right to abortion has given women enhanced spiritual development and more joy in life." He added, "That by supporting legal abortion, the RCRC is picking up the mantle God is calling us to carry."

 

That's right folks, the good "reverend" is saying abortion makes life peaches for the lady-folk, and that by advancing the killing of the pre-born he's doing God's work.

 

Evidently the "reverend's" perspective as a man, runs fairly counter to women in general. On Friday, with no prearrangement at all, I opened up my phone lines and allowed any woman the right to say anything they wished to the "reverend" directly. Over three hours, all but one woman had actually had an abortion. None who had, confirmed Knox's assertions. Only one supported Knox--but not in the literal meaning of what he said--but by claiming that he must have been taken out of context. (That woman later admitted that she supports abortion on demand, though she has never had one.) You can hear the stories of these women here: Hour 1, Hour 2, Hour 3. (They include women whose husband had forced them to get an abortion, and a woman who had been twice raped by her father at 13 and 14 and was forced to have consecutive abortions by the same father.)

 

It was a heart-breaking reality to see this man, "Reverend" Knox, lie about how women truly feel about abortion--especially given the reality that in 98% of all abortions women indicate that a man in their life is the primary reason they are choosing abortion as opposed to welcoming an innocent child into this world.

 

Also publicly defying Reverend Knox's absurd, distorted, deceptive, lies were the ladies of "Silent No More." These are post-abortive women who led the more than half-million throng in this week's March For Life. It is also important to note that the March For Life this year, at close to 600,000, out paced the 400,000 who turned out for President Obama's inauguration.

 

I am not sure why they are doing so, but it is clear that the men of the political, theological, and cultural left have become weak of mind, will, and temperament. Hiding behind the legitimate but uninformed voices of children to put anti-consitutional reforms into place on the issue of keeping our society safe, hiding behind political correctness that argues for sameness instead genuine equality to protect our nation from its worst enemies, and claiming God would be pleased, when women themselves know God's truth otherwise, in the killing of their own children--the men of the left resemble nothing like men at all.

 

Rather they most strongly resemble a strange effeminate characteristic. Weak when God made them strong. Dumb when God designed them to discern. And dishonest when our culture needs them to be truthful.

 

They are in short very little of anything God made them to be, and it is the women and children in our nation and in our future who will suffer most!

Mickelson the Migrant

By Jim Pettit

Saturday, January 26, 2013

 

Professional golfer Phil Mickelson must feel like the guy who’s driving the ball collector while the driving range is still open.

 

Earlier this week he complained about California’s crushing tax burden: “If you add up all the federal and you look at the disability and the unemployment and the Social Security and the state, my tax rate’s 62, 63 percent. So I’ve got to make some decisions on what I’m going to do.” Since he makes about $40 million a year, ESPN called Mickelson’s comments a “blunder,” while the network’s golf writer warned him to “just play golf.” Reuters said the golfer had “taken a mulligan” when he apologized for the comments this week. “Were Phil Mickelson’s tax comments insensitive?,” the presumably sensitive Los Angeles Times asks in an online poll.

 

The mainstream media might find Mickelson’s comments insensitive, but mainstream Americans do not. It is the governors and legislators in certain state capitals who are insensitive when they enact punitive tax codes that drive people across their borders. Not only is this insensitive, but it ignores the consequences of a shrinking tax base.

 

When class warfare and emotion are removed from the debate, a clear and convincing trend is obvious: States with the highest tax burdens tend to lose the most people, and those with the lowest tax burdens tend to gain the most.

 

This conclusion is derived by analyzing Internal Revenue Service migration data and comparing that with state and local tax burdens. The Tax Foundation has a web-based migration calculator that enables anyone — including journalists — to make quick and easy comparisons between states on tax flight. The calculator shows the numbers of tax filers who moved from one state to another, and how much income shifted along with them.

 

Between 2009 and 2010 (the most recent tax year for which IRS data is available), California lost over 41,000 residents (including taxpayers and their family members) to other states, the third-largest net outflow in the country. And that was before last year, when the state’s income tax went up again to a top marginal rate of 13.3 percent, along with an increase in the sales tax. In 2010, Californians faced the nation’s fourth-highest tax burden, according to the Tax Foundation.

 

Where did the most Californians go? Texas. Nearly 15,000 more Californians moved to Texas than vice versa. Texans enjoy the nation’s sixth-lowest state-tax burden, and their state gained over 93,000 residents from other states, the highest figure in the country.

 

So if Governor Jerry Brown and the California legislature plan to ever balance the budget, they can start by figuring out how to stop nearly $380 million in annual income from leaving their state to Texas alone. Those incomes will not be subject to state and local income, property, and sales taxes because these individuals have vanished from the tax rolls, and their purchasing power will no longer benefit California’s economy.

 

However, there will be no public-policy changes if powerful elected officials are in denial. And, make no mistake, they are in denial.

 

The chairman of California’s state-senate budget committee told the San Francisco Chronicle after Mickelson’s remarks that he had “never seen tax flight so significant that it should make a financial difference or influence public policy.” Really? Perhaps the media should ask the senator how California is supposed to make up for over $1 billion in annual income fleeing the state. Again, that was just between 2009 and 2010. The senator might want to spend a few minutes using the tax-migration calculator to determine how many billions California has lost since he’s been in office.

 

Let’s look at another golfer and state that were mentioned in the tax flap. Tiger Woods said this week that he left his native California and set up residence in Florida because Florida has no income tax. Florida trails only Texas in attracting people. A net of more than 30,000 members of taxpaying households moved to Florida from 2009 to 2010, bringing with them nearly $3.5 billion in annual incomes.

 

And so it goes. Don’t expect too many wealthy professionals to come out in support of moving to Illinois, with the nation’s 11th highest tax burden, or New York, with the nation’s top tax burden. New York lost over 67,000 people during this period, and Illinois lost nearly 41,000 – the highest and fourth-highest net migration rates in the nation, respectively.

 

Sometimes government officials stumble on the truth without realizing it. Governor Brown’s office, attempting to justify continued spending on his favored constituencies while downplaying the importance of tax migration, said, “We have to look beyond our personal interests to where we are going as a society.”

 

They should heed their own advice.